Oh, right. No front page updates in a while, since not much was truly update-worthy (though the expansion has really been fantastic as a whole, "hey guys we killed Kel'Thuzad... again" doesn't entirely make for an enthralling post). As a bonus, a flex pic, albeit with an impostor, yet also a legend in his own right:



Grats to Eliiria on the mount, and to everyone who got this done tonight. This isn't the hardest encounter Blizzard has ever designed, by any means, but it's also no joke either. It's not M'uru, but it's definitely Sunwell difficulty at this gear level, and that's encouraging. It's certainly proof that Blizzard hasn't forgotten how to make fights that are hard, but also are fun as well.

I don't really buy the argument that the game has lost all challenge -- we're just getting started. Remember, Gruul and Magtheridon and SSC/TK v1.0 were all overtuned and half-broken. If we'd gotten the final nerfed versions of those on release, they'd have been steamrolled just as easily as the WLK content has, without a doubt. It's silly to fault them for actually getting "entry-level" tuning right so far. As I said, Sartharion + 3 drakes isn't pre-nerf M'uru, true -- but it also isn't something that's exactly going to be accessible to the "average" player. The prevailing attitude among much of the community strikes me as fickle. Sunwell was a masterpiece, and so much of the rest of this expansion so far is so polished. The same people who made all that stuff that we loved so much are the ones who made this content. I think they deserve, if not the benefit of the doubt, at least a chance, and some time.

This encounter is a promising start, at the very least.

December 11 update:


Yes, it's harder. Also a ton of fun. Great job all, and I'm looking forward to our caster group pulling it off this weekend too (no pressure guys!).

Major fail on giving the mount to a troll. Oh right, grats, etc.

Trolls need a ride too.

The screenshot is amazing, like Eliiria's tiny drake is alighting on Dvine's arm in some kind of perverse Dr. Doolittle thing going on there.

haha, that's all I see now! That's awesome.

Grats guys.

Also Dvine ftw

I'm trying to think of a witty line about trolls and rides, but I'm failing here

Grats.

Finally someone from the really HC raiders who isn't complaining, it was good to read this for a change. Thanks.

Congratulations to the most beautiful female troll on all of Mal'Ganis on her new mount.

[Lavender Mageweave Shirt]

Eliiria's gonna have fun driving that drake on the left side of the road with all the other Canadians.

You should update even if its boring. Remember how fun those were for the general player in EQ.

Anyway, You've really lost perspective of difficulty over time there Praet...
I understand being positive and all in your posts - but you've got to realize when its to a fault.

Entry. Level. Raiding. The challenges are still there, and still coming.

In other news, congratulations on giving the troll the best ride, just like the official forums! Okay, not really that witty of a line, but it's the best I've got.

I don't see your objection. Sunwell was probably the best raid instance in the history of WoW (you could even make an argument in the history of MMOs) and Sarth+3 demonstrates in a sea of "ezmode" encounters that Blizzard knows how to push the envelope. More than that, it demonstrates that Blizzard can make encounters which are simultaneously accessible to the low end and challenging to the high end of the spectrum. WOTLK is great because it focuses on what makes WoW great and marginalizes what makes it boring/lame/whatever negative adjective. There are people who have a different expectation of high-end MMO gaming, but Blizzard seems pretty comfortable telling them to take it or leave it.

Pretty sure I haven't. The fight took us 3 hours to learn. I'm not saying it was staggeringly hard. I'd say it's about as hard as Felmyst (roughly -- in BT gear). That's not very hard. It is, however, a "Sunwell-difficulty" fight. Certainly harder to learn than anything I can recall in BT (except maybe original Shahraz, which was also pretty much a Sunwell-difficulty fight, albeit a goddamn annoying one). And realistically, this is still entry-level content. If the hardmode of entry-level content can be roughly on par with that (that is, harder than every TBC encounter, IMO, except for maybe 4 or 5), then isn't all the QQ about how all challenge is gone from the game rather premature?

Also, for what it's worth, doing "of the Nightfall" (see below) was even harder to execute, though obviously it didn't take us terribly long to learn either (under 2 hours), since we could build upon our experience from the 25-man version. That's also encouraging in terms of just proving that, yes, you really can create hard 10-man content. The individual skill and execution requirement is much higher. Ask any healer who's done 10-man Sarth + 3 drakes in a 2-healer group, and they'll tell you just how hectic it is. As an individual player, I certainly found it harder than, say, M'uru healing. Obviously there are fewer people who need to execute, but the execution requirement is in the same ballpark. And I really don't think I have a warped sense of perspective on this one. The stuff's honestly hard. Ask the people who did it with me -- they were all people who did M'uru and K'J with us too. It was intense, and it felt very rewarding. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.

Oh hey, grats on 10+3 Sartharion.

I think it's cool that they seem to have made a 10-man encounter that is not only hard but harder than its 25-man counterpart. The conventional wisdom for a while was that it would be impossible or impractical to make hard 10-man raids (of course, the conventional wisdom for a while was that it would be impossible to make hard 25-man raids, too).

Actually I don't entirely think this refutes that argument. The point was always not that it's impossible to make a hard 10-man, but that the coordination/difficulty cap is higher from a standpoint of tactics and collective execution. The fewer moving pieces exist in a fight, the fewer possible "solutions" to the puzzle there are, and the more players are involved, the more potential areas of failure. Figuring out the best strat for 10-man Sarth+3 isn't really terribly tricky. That's mainly a concern for the first tier of guilds though, since once the best strat IS figured it, then this aspect doesn't really matter anymore. But approaching the fight with a blank slate of information, an encounter with more people, more adds, more tanks, more forms of CC, etc., available, inherently has more possible approaches than one where you only have a couple of people to tank a couple of specific things and there isn't nearly as much room to improvise.

Individual execution requirements are certainly independent of encounter size. Being one of 2 healers on 10-man Sarth+3 is objectively much "harder" than being one of 6 healers on 25-man Sarth+3. I'd say that perfectly completing the Shartuul event in Blade's Edge is a higher execution requirement than most raid encounters in the game, from an individual perspective. But obviously a fight that required 5 people to separately do the Shartuul event perfectly would be harder than just the solo event. And a fight that required 25 people to all do it perfectly would be far harder still. Fun or good design? No, but still harder.

Ultimately it's all a theoretical argument anyway -- it's up to Blizzard to utilize that design space if they want to. They could easily make every 10-man harder than every 25-man if they so chose. But I do still think that the theoretical difficulty cap remains higher the more people are involved.

The time it takes to learn even the "hard-mode" versions of these bosses is skewed downward by two things. First, all of them were available to learn in the Beta so everyone became very familiar with the encounters before we even reached 80 on the live servers. Second (probably the most important) is that by the time you attempt Sarth+3 you've killed Sarth+1 and Sarth+2. You know the fight inside and out; each jump in difficulty just adds another wrinkle so it's not like learning a new encounter from scratch. Executing the encounter is probably about as hard as an early Sunwell encounter, but judging the difficulty of the achievement based purely on time spent attempting it doesn't make sense.

Also, there are a large number of players for whom Naxxramas, Sartharion and Malygos are end-game. People will be running them in two years just like they were running Karazhan at the end of TBC. They're easy, but they're around the right spot when you consider their place in progression.

The first 3 bosses of sunwell were worked out before the patch went live just like we had extensive knowledge of the Sarth encounter before we attempted it with three drakes. You can't really say it only took 3 hours to learn since by then we got the whole don't stand in the fire bit well out of the way. The measure of difficulty is in the moving parts, Sarth +3 drakes has many much like Felmyst or K'J did.


efb:God damnit ghando

He posted like 40 minutes before you...

I'm confused. I'm not saying that most current content isn't easy. It is very easy. Sarth+3 (and especially 10-man) aren't "very easy." Of course they are doable, but they're not trivial, they do require execution and coordination and strong DPS and so forth. You can't just autopilot through it on repeat attempts. Of course it's farmable, but so's everything -- so was the "impossible" version of M'uru that my guild and many others one-shot week after week. My point was simply this: Sarth+3 is an intro-tier hardmode, and I'd say it's more difficult/complex/whatever than the vast majority of raid content in TBC. It IS a harder fight than anything in BT, and it's harder than Kalecgos and Brutallus. So yeah, it's like Felmyst. I fully expect to find a M'uru-level challenge somewhere in Ulduar -- Blizzard has said they really like how Sarth+3 worked out and are hoping to expand on that model going forward.

And yes, it took us 3 hours to learn, but as Ghando noted, we also had experience with the easier version. But uh, Felmyst also took us one night to learn (3-4 hours). So did most fights in TBC, from pre-nerf Gruul and SSC through Sunwell.

And you personally haven't experienced a huge portion of the fights you're discussing firsthand, have you?

I have in fact - not all though. Surprising argument though considering it doesn't change the facts (as you should know), and I'd think given my experience and history I'd at least have some basis for evaluating difficulty... My point is really restated in your own - since TBC there hasn't been much of anything that has posed a challenge outside of a couple fights.